• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.62 no.2
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• pp.349-373
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the way of knowledge production in social welfare and to graft feminist epistemology to the discipline of social welfare. To put it more concretely, as analyzing the epistemological and methodological issues appeared in the articles in "orean Journal of Social Welfare", this study examines the meanings of feminist epistemology and its implications to research and practice in social welfare. From its onset, feminist research criticized the 'mainstream' ways of conceptualizing knowledge construction via research conducted upon a positivist epistemological position. Particularly, western feminists have problematized the androcentric bias embedded within the so-called 'social sciences' that we have taken for granted as 'scientific,' 'objective,' and 'neutral,' and attempted to redirect and reformulate the way of knowledge production with new concepts of 'strong objectivity,' 'partial/situated knowledge,' and 'strong reflection.' We believe that the implications of feminist epistemology to enable us to reflect the power relationship between subject and object, I and Other, and the researcher and the researched will contribute to recover the original vision of social welfare as critical theory and liberating practice in social work.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare Studies
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.5-44
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• 2010

The main purpose of this study is to critically examine the existing theoretical as well as analytical scope of 'sexual minority' in Social Welfare, and to (re)construct and expand it incorporating feminist theories on sexuality. The body of literature on sexual minority or homosexuality in social welfare in Korea as well as in the West can be characterized as two distinct features: first, medical discourse leaning on pathological perspective which perceives homosexuality as a disease or defect, homosexual as a pervert; and second, human rights perspective premised upon the idea of diversity and multi-culturalism, both which are anchoring at 'essentialism.' Based upon the understanding of sexuality as a social construct, we argue that feminist insight on sexuality can lead to reconceptualizing homosexuality and reorienting theories and practices in social welfare. From radical feminism to postmodern queer theories, feminists have developed diverse ideas and complex theories on sexuality and homosexuality, including the concept of 'compulsory heterosexuality,' 'lesbianism as political resistance,' and 'performative gender.' For feminists, particularly, sexuality which is constructed in the complex power matrix of dominations to producing and maintaining inequalities and discriminations is not merely a distinctive variable, but one of the important organizational principles such as gender, class, race, age, and nationality. This epistemological principle will hopefully shed lights on alternative 'knowledge' on homosexuality in social welfare, and lead to significant contribution to its critical expansion in theory and practice.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.85-109
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• 2012

This qualitative study explored a middle-aged lesbian's life and her identities by the oral life history approach in feminist epistemology, where the participant is not the object but the subject of knowledge. The participant kept her own perspective that her homosexuality was not intrinsic but constructed. In her life's history, she was a "docile body" accepting socially constructed historical meaning of homosexuality, as well as a "resistant body" protesting against social discrimination and oppression for homosexual population. She overcame an embedded negative recognition of her scaled injured body and her sexuality as "deficient". Finally, she showed an amazing resilience and an indomitable spirit for reconstructing the meaning of her body as "blessed." Beyond the deficient body, as an active agent not the pathologic sexual minority, she could cultivate compassion and empathy for others. From the results, it is important how to place gender and sexuality in the context of social work theory and practice. Sexuality, not sexual orientation, is 'our' collective agenda to address the social problems which were associated with social hierarchy, inequality, and injustice.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.50 no.3
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• pp.289-303
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• 2015

This paper is an introductory research to theorize women migrants' positionality in the era of globalization and the feminization of migration. It particularly examines three recent theoretical approaches within feminist studies and their application to the feminist migration study. Migration means a process of continuous negotiations of one's social and material positions within ever changing relations and situations through crossing various borders including national boundaries. Women migrants face multifaceted oppressions due to gendered relation and greater challenges to transform their identities. They embody politics of location through migration. The paper revolves around theories that explore a potential of feminist subjectivation of marginalized women such as female migrants through their identity negotiation and transformation. The theories in questions are Borderlands and the New Mestiza introduced by Gloria $Anzald{\acute{u}}a$, Intersectionality of oppressions, and Transpositions and the Nomadic Subjects by Rosi Braidotti who borrowed the theories of Deleuze and Guattari through feminist critiques. These theories all represent power relations and subject transformations through spatial metaphors. rough spatialized understandings, the paper proposes interlocking relations among space, gender and migration, and explores conceptual tools as well as epistemological insights for Korean migration study.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.50 no.1
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• pp.123-139
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• 2015

This paper attempts to complement the methodological and conceptual lack of spatial thinking in Korean women's movement research and to facilitate further discussion on this field of research, by drawing on recent academic discussion on scale developed particularly among the Western critical and feminist geographers. The purposes of the paper are following. First, it addresses the need to utilize the concept of scale in women's movement research. Numerous spatial metaphors often proliferated with indiscretion in the feminist approach have rather tended to hinder fully understanding the spatiality of social movements. In order to examine the spatiality of social movements as both conceptual tool and praxis, not merely as metaphor, the paper incorporates main issues in recent scale discourses with particular attention to the debate between Marston and Brenner, and explores their implications for women's movement research in Korea. Second, it emphasizes the multi-scalar approach by highlighting the role of micro-scale, the less studied side in social movement literature. The public and the private divide, the long time battle ground in feminist research, is often intermingled with the hierarchical scalar understanding which considers the global as more powerful and important than the local. The reproductive realm, however, is indispensably related to production and political economic realm. The paper explores the very site where both the public/private divide and the hierarchical scalar understanding can be dismantled. It is the site where the private becomes public and the local becomes the global (and vice versa). Drawing on a brief example of an anti-FTA movement of women with strollers in Korea, it examines the way the multi-scalar approach advances the understanding of Korean women's movement.

• Women's Studies Review
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.79-120
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the implication of feminist oral history from a postcolonial feminist perspective as critically reexamining the relationship between hearer and speaker, representer and narrator, the said and the unsaid, and secrecy and silence. Based upon oral (life) history of a U.S. military prostitute (yanggongju), I tried to show the experiences of a historically-excluded and marginalized 'Other,' and then critically reevaluate the meaning of encountering 'Other', not just through the research process but also in the post/colonial society in Korea. The narrative of an old woman in the "kijichon" (a formal prostitute in U.S. military base) shows how woman has navigated the boundaries between inevitability/coincidence, the enforced/the voluntary, prostitution/intimacy, and military prostitute/military bride while continually negotiating as well as having conflict with various myths and ideologies of the 'normative woman,' 'nationhood,' and 'normal family.' In addition, her narrative which causes the rupture of our own stereotypical images of a military prostitute not only proves the possibility of reconstructing the self-identity of a subaltern woman, but also redirects the research focus from the research object to the research subject (ourselves). Consequently, the implication in feminist oral history is that feminist researchers who whish to represent the experiences of other should first inquire 'what/how we can hear,' 'why we want to know others,' and 'who we are,' while simultaneously asking if subaltern woman can speak.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.169-206
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• 2019

This article seeks to explore new relationships and ethics of human and technology by analyzing a cultural imaginary produced by artificial intelligence. Drawing on theoretical reflections of the Feminist Scientific and Technological Studies which understand science and technology as the matter of care(Puig de la Bellacas, 2011), this paper focuses on the fact that artificial intelligence and robots materialize cultural imaginary such as autonomy. This autonomy, defined as the capacity to adapt to a new environment through self-learning, is accepted as a way to conceptualize an authentic human or an ideal subject. However, this article argues that artificial intelligence is mediated by and dependent on invisible human labor and complex material devices, suggesting that such autonomy is close to fiction. The recent growth of the so-called 'assistant technology' shows that it is differentially visualizing the care work of both machines and humans. Technology and its cultural imaginary hide the care work of human workers and actively visualize the one of the machine. And they make autonomy and agency ideal humanness, leaving disabled bodies and dependency as unworthy. Artificial intelligence and its cultural imaginary negate the value of disabled bodies while idealizing abled-bodies, and result in eliminating the real relationship between man and technology as mutually dependent beings. In conclusion, the author argues that the technology we need is not the one to exclude the non-typical bodies and care work of others, but the one to include them as they are. This technology responsibly empathizes marginalized beings and encourages solidarity between fragile beings. Inspired by an art performance of artist Sue Austin, the author finally comes up with and suggests 'artificial intelligence in wheelchair' as an alternative figuration for the currently dominant 'autonomous artificial intelligence'.